cotton exports. Xipuhl was part of a formal diplomatic legation from the Land of the Jaguar, and much of her midsummer had been taken up with ‘stuffy meetings with old men in airless rooms’, she had said.
Sabela was the only one without a job during the trip. It was her husband who was in the business of exporting llama and alpaca wool and other High Country textiles to Northland. Sabela’s people were always honoured in Northland because of historic links; the High Country had given Northlanders the potato, a precious crop which, they said, had enabled their unique culture to survive on the fringe of a continent full of farmers. Of the three of them Sabela was the junior partner, Walks In Mist supposed, and she was a rather vague young woman — her head in the clouds, Xipuhl said, just like the pretty country she came from — but on the ship, she had been the one who had brought them together.
‘Well,’ Sabela said now, ‘I think what I’m going to like about this tavern is the drinks they serve. What a selection!’
The menu was inscribed into the oak surface of the table itself, in the loops and bars of the unique Northlander script. The three women chose drinks from across the eastern half of the planet: Albian ale for Xipuhl, a decent Gairan wine for Walks In Mist, and a fine potato spirit from Rus for Sabela. When the drinks arrived they knocked their cups together.
Xipuhl said briskly, ‘I imagine the next time we drink together we will be back on the ship, for it’s going to take me the rest of my time to get packed up.’
Sabela pulled a face. ‘Be grateful you don’t have children. I’ll swear my two support the economy of the local trinket makers single-handed.’ The breeze turned, an oddly chill wind blew in from the west, and they all reacted, shifting, pulling their wraps tighter. ‘It has been a cool summer,’ Sabela murmured. ‘My two have complained about that.’
Walks In Mist frowned. ‘I’ve heard mutterings about great meetings of scholars, discussions of the turning of the weather. Do you think there’s anything in it?’
‘I’ve not much truck for scholars,’ Xipuhl said firmly. ‘Who can know what the future holds?’
‘And we’ll not let it govern our lives,’ Sabela said.
The horn blasted for a third time, announcing the noisy eruptor display that would end the long day of celebration. People started to drift out of the tavern.
‘Let’s make a pact,’ Walks In Mist said impulsively. ‘We’ll keep in touch. Let’s meet when the Northland fleet comes again to the West, in three years’ time.’
Sabela laughed girlishly. ‘Oh, yes — what a lovely idea.’
Xipuhl grinned. ‘Well, as you are the only companions I’ve found on this trip who haven’t wanted to get some kind of business out of me, I’m for it.’
‘And we’ll come back to this very bar,’ Sabela said. ‘And order the same drinks, three years from now.’
‘Agreed,’ said Walks In Mist, and they raised their cups again and toasted the pact.
But the breeze gusted once more. The candles on the tables flickered, and around the bar people pulled cloaks over their shoulders. A few people laughed, and sent mock curses at the little mothers and other gods for their wilfulness.
‘That’s if we’re all still here in three years’ time,’ Xipuhl said with morbid humour.
6
Alxa stood with her brother on the roof of the Wall, surrounded by a crowd of Etxelur elite in their fancy ceremonial House robes, waiting for the wrestling princes to return to the parapet.
The sun was near the horizon now, and the day felt markedly colder, as if this were an autumn day, not midsummer. Lights sparked over the face of the Wall below, and in the curving reefs of the lower city. People had gathered on the plain beyond, filling the open spaces and lining the canals, waiting for the show. The crowds always came to the Giving at Etxelur, although this year, Alxa was sure, there were plenty of nestspills, that cruel Northland word, people displaced from their homes by flood or drought, by poverty or hunger or disease, here for handouts rather than celebration.
But, nestspills or not, the crowd all responded with gasps and cheers when the show started: the tremendous banners unrolling down the face of the Wall, the fireworks filling the sky with dancing light. And then came the fire-drug eruptors themselves, suddenly thrust from their portals in the Wall’s upper face, a hundred of them shouting simultaneously. Smoke belched and shot flew, gleaming red-hot, to fall in empty spaces beyond the crowds.
While the Etxelur folk applauded and cheered, Nelo watched the princes, who were stunned by the display of the mighty weapons. Only Northland, of the western countries, had the secret of the fire drug from Cathay. ‘Look at them, those loudmouths, Mago and Arnuwanda. They won’t be bragging about the might of their cattle-folk armies now.’
Their mother came pushing through the crowd. ‘
7
The next morning Alxa and Nelo were summoned to the Hall of Annids for the formal Giving Bounty meeting. As apprentice members of the House of the Owl, they had to wear their formal uniforms, a black shift topped by a cloak quilted and stitched to look like the wings of the emblematic bird.
The setting was spectacular. The Hall of Annids, relocated and rebuilt extensively over the ages, was contained within the body of the Wall, just under the roof, and its great stained-glass ceiling was one of the wonders of the Etxelur District. Though the sunlight gleamed through the glass it wasn’t a particularly warm day — there hadn’t been a
‘And it’s going to be as dull as a Hatti funeral,’ she moaned to Nelo, as they filed into the Hall behind their parents and other Northland dignitaries.
Nelo just laughed.
The session was already coming to order, if slowly, and Alxa and her twin sat with their parents behind their distant aunt Ywa. Ywa was Annid of Annids and the speaker of the Water Council, the semi-permanent body that governed Etxelur and Northland. Crimm was here, another uncle, the fisherman who had brought Uncle Pyxeas home from Coldland. Other members of the Council attended, along with senior members of other Houses: the priest-scholars, the masons who maintained the Wall, the water engineers who managed the drainage of the countryside beyond. Dignitaries from the Wall’s many Districts had gathered too, their gowns emblazoned with the numbers and symbols of their homes: Four East, Seventeen West. Only Great Etxelur itself had no east or west designation, no number; Etxelur was the centre, the zero. Before the stage, below the Northlanders, sat the guests in their parties: Carthaginians and Hatti and Muslims and Germans and Franks, even a few Albians, stern and silent. In all there were perhaps fifty people here in this great and ancient Hall. And as they waited for the session to begin, the foreigners, dignitaries in their own countries, showed signs of restlessness.
They were all waiting for Pyxeas.
At last Alxa’s great-uncle came bustling into the Hall, with slates and scrolls of paper under his arm. He wasn’t in the stylised wolf-fur cloak he should have been wearing to mark his membership of his own House of scholars and priests; instead he wore smelly-looking furs that seemed as if they were still crusted with seawater. And he was accompanied by a young man, short, stocky, plump-looking, with a flat, sketchy face and short dark hair. He too was bundled up in a fur jacket and trousers, and he looked uncomfortably hot. He was a Coldlander, Alxa realised; he must have travelled back across the ocean with Pyxeas. The scholar glanced around, squinting, short-sighted, comical with his ruddy face and shock of snow-white hair sticking up around a bald pate. Alxa hadn’t seen him for three years; he seemed a lot older than she remembered.
